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After Claudia Webbe MP’s 13th October 2021 conviction for harassment at Westminster Magistrates’ Court criminal defence solicitor Joseph Kotrie-Monson explains the factors that affect sentence in a harassment case.
Transcript of comment:
This is a case which is serious enough to warrant a very short custodial sentence but a harassment case in the magistrates court is usually dealt with by way of a community order.
This is an offence which causes harm, but not violence, and the prosecution charged Mrs Webbe with an offence which was inherently low level
Courts take into account aggravating features which increase the seriousness for sentences and mitigating features which reduce it and make a community order more likely.
Here the biggest aggravating features are the sustained calls on 18 occasions, the fear that pointing to violence on one occasion would cause, and the vulnerability of a victim who is being threatened with release of compromising photographs.
The mitigation also has to be taken into account. Mrs Webbe likely has no previous convictions. She is also a public servant of many years standing. There is the tragedy of this ending her professional life, and fundamentally, one might expect that a tribunal would have some sympathy for a woman phoning someone that she at least believed to be the lover of her husband.
Where do the scales fall, we really don’t know. District Judge Goldspring has given Mrs Webbe the warning about custody, but judges nearly always do that, even if they intend a community order. Professionally I’d be a little surprised if she received a custodial sentence, but the magistrates court can be an unpredictable place.
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